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T<\/span>oward the One,<\/em> When I lived in the Zen monastery in Oakland, I served on the jisha team responsible among other things for hosting guests. So, no surprise when the roshi told me we were getting a VIP visitor.<\/p>\n His name was Samuel Lewis, and while he was mostly known as a Sufi master, he had also been acknowledged for his insight by spiritual teachers in a number of traditions, one of which was Zen. Ours was a bit more mainstream Zen Buddhist<\/a> community and so most of us were expecting for us something on the rather exotic side, sort of a Zen zebra.<\/p>\n We weren\u2019t disappointed. When he arrived I answered the door. Standing on the front step was an elderly man only a few inches more than five feet tall. He had shoulder length grey hair, a full beard, and oversized black plastic framed glasses. He was wearing the robes of a Korean Zen priest, I later learned put on special for the occasion. Before I could say anything, actually before I could take a full breath he brushed past me and looked around. His first words were, \u201cWali Ali, take a letter.\u201d<\/p>\n I recall a young somewhat pudgy man followed along after him trying to write in a stenographer\u2019s notebook. As the Zen and Sufi master\u2019s entourage of four or five followed he proceeded to examine the large old building that had been converted into a Zen monastery dictating his observations along the way, mostly, although not a hundred percent positive.<\/p>\n It was a whirlwind. And when the shaikh Zen master and his disciples left, a visible, certainly a tangible echo played through the quiet rooms of our little house monastery for an age to follow.<\/p>\n Years later, after I left the Zen monasteries, I had a period of wandering. At some point I ended up in the Khanqah founded by Murshid Sam and now led by his disciple Wali Ali Meyer.<\/a> For a time I studied the intricacies of Inayat Khan\u2019s universalist Sufism<\/a> with Wali Ali. Eventually as we parted, he to an adventure in the American South, and me to what I didn\u2019t realize at the time would be a revisioned Zen practice, he gave me what was called the ninth bayat, blessing or initiation.<\/p>\n Yesterday I learned after some years suffering from dementia Wali Ali had returned to the Khanqah to die.<\/p>\n As it happens, it was on this day, the 23rd of November, in 2019 that Imam, the last Sumatran rhinoceros<\/a> in Malaysia died. Something in the neighborhood of eighty individuals still live in neighboring Indonesia. But the future of the species is somewhat past bleak.<\/p>\n Reading about this triggered a small cascade of thoughts, mind bubbles. It falls hard on how we humans have just crossed eight billion individuals across the globe. It is also connected with the harsh realities of global climate change. And with it thoughts of the years ahead, and connected in some ways terrible dislocations of population and mass migrations.\u00a0 Death and birth and, well, most of all, movement.<\/p>\n I think of my Sufi teacher, his years teaching, his years teaching with dementia, and now his teaching with death.<\/p>\n It brings to my mind a koan. Koans are a meditation thing out of the Zen tradition, birthed in China, given some very interesting shapes in Japan, and now a spiritual practice engaged across the planet.<\/p>\n It\u2019s gathered as case 91 in the Blue Cliff Record<\/a><\/em> and case 25 in the Book of Serenity<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n
\nthe Perfection of Love, Harmony, and Beauty,<\/em>
\nthe Only Being,<\/em>
\nUnited with all the Illuminated Souls,<\/em>
\nWho form the Embodiment of the Master,<\/em>
\nthe Spirit of Guidance.<\/em><\/p>\n